Krapps Last Tape and the Beckettian mimesis of

regret
ERIC P. LEVY

Perhaps no drama more deserves to be called a memory play

(to invoke Ruby Cohns designation) than Krapps Last Tape
a play which, through pairing the aged Krapp with what Martin
Esslin terms an autobiographical library of annual recorded
statements, unfolds a series of rememorations.1 In this regard,
Krapps Last Tape, like The Glass Menagerie as described by
its author, Tennessee Williams, appears as a work in which
nostalgia is the first condition.2 This impression is reinforced
by the abundant connections, expertly charted by James
Knowlson, between the lives of Krapp and Samuel Beckett, his
author.3 The relentless emphasis, in Krapps Last Tape, on
memory as the agent of negative retrospection on life has
prompted many critics to construe the play in generically
mimetic terms, and hence to interpret Krapp as the Beckettian
version of Everyman. For example, according to Joseph Smith,
the play treats the question whether any life can be said to have
been lived for other than naught.4 According to Anthony
Kubiak, the play consummates the mimetic tradition of
Western drama, with respect to the inevitability of pain,
failure, and hopelessness in life.5 Daniel Katz transposes this
universalizing tendency to a more theoretical plane, by
interpreting Krapp in poststructuralist terms as a representation
of the interminable denial of subjective appropriation which
makes up Not I.6
But to construe the play, in generically mimetic terms, as the
representation of some aspect or quality universally applicable
to human life is to construe Krapps plight, at age sixty-nine, as
irreversibly inevitable, and not as one which could, by any
means, be averted. In such interpretation, Krapp cannot be
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Sydney Studies
judged responsible for his predicament; for its cause concerns
the intrinsic nature of life, not the intrinsic nature of Krapp. Yet,
the upshot of such interpretation is to suppress or obscure the
moral dimension of the playa dimension memorably
formulated, in another context, by Matthew Arnold, as entailing
the question of [h]ow to live, how to apply ideas to life, so
that life is not abandoned to passion or allowed to drift at
7
hazard. But in thus demanding the avoidance of
irresponsibility, the moral question of how to live presupposes
the recognition of responsibilitythe obligation, that is, to
direct life toward its proper goal, however defined.
The moral dimension is not only fundamental to Krapps
Last Tape, but also fundamentally ambiguous. From one
perspective, Krapp displays irresponsibility, in becoming the
victim of his own psychological mechanism or habitual attitude
to life, which reduces his existence to the state of regret,
regarding the one event which he obsessively remembers: Be
again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once
wasnt enough for you. (Pause.) Lie down across her (pp. 267). Yet from another perspective, through precisely this lapse
into regret, Krapp displays responsibility, by conducting his life
to the Beckettian goal of abandonmenta state of vacancy
beyond the reach of regret: Regretting, thats what helps you
on . . . regretting what is, regretting what was . . . thats what
transports you, towards the end of regretting (The Unnamable,
p. 371). Ironically, neither alternative confirms the conventional
view that the play represents the futility of life. If Krapp is
construed in terms of irresponsibility, then his plight, by
definition, cannot be attributed to universally impinging forces
over which he has no control. But if Krapp is construed in terms
of responsibility and successful achievement of the Beckettian
goal, then his plight cannot be deemed an example of failure,
and hopelessness (to retrieve Kubiaks characterization, cited
earlier).
The ambiguity of Krapps predicament, with respect to the
alternatives of irresponsibility and responsibility, is epitomized
by the time indicated in the stage directions. Though the
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Krapps Last Tape

accumulated tapes suggest Krapps concern with the past, and
though his observance of this particular birthday (his sixtyninth) emphasizes his situation in the present, the first stage
direction of the play indicates A late evening in the future (p.
9, my emphasis). Since Krapp is in a present that rememorates
various pasts, the designation of an evening in the future
becomes problematic. But the problem can be solved when we
realize that the temporal designation is not chronological but
symbolic. That is, it indicates, not a date not yet reached on a
calendar, but an inevitability toward which Krapp is always
tending. But is this inevitability due to factors which Krapp
cannot control or to factors for which he is responsible? On the
one hand, as we shall explore, Krapps predicament seems to
stem from the mentality or perspective on life which he
embodies at any age, but which in principle he could modify.
On the other hand, Krapp appears caught in a cycle whose
momentum cannot be altered. The locus classicus of the
Beckettian notion of unalterable inevitability occurs in Molloy:
And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied
collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was
always condemned to be.8 A similar formulation appears in
Waiting for Godot: The essential doesnt change.9 An
analogue occurs in Company: And you as you always were.
Alone. 10
The first alternativeirresponsibility or failure properly to
address the problem of how to livecan be introduced by
contrasting the view of age in Krapps Last Tape with that in
Samuel Johnsons Rasselas. Our intention here is simply to
foreground an important aspect of Becketts play, not to adduce
any theories of literary influence on Becketts workthough,
as Knowlson indicates, Beckett conceived, in late 1936, the
never executed plan of writing a play concerning Dr. Johnson
and Mrs Thrale.11 Rasselas begins with the admonition that
disappointment in life is inevitable; for age cannot perform the
promises of youth:
Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and
persue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that
age will perform the promises of youth, and that the
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Sydney Studies
deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow;
attend to the history of Rasselas prince of Abissinia.12

To Johnson, the problem of unhappiness in old age is generic.

The individual bears no responsibility for it. But from the point
of view which we shall now adopt, this is not the situation in
Krapps Last Tape, where Krapps plight results from his own
choices. Here, to invoke the Heracleitean dictum, character is
mans fate.13
The notion of deficient self-control and failure to assume
responsibility for ones actions is localized in Krapps relation
to bananas (though critics who discuss the bananas treat them as
phallic symbols, ultimately indicative of Krapps masturbatory
narcissism).14 Despite repeated resolutions over the years to
Cut em out! (p. 14), Krapp continues gorging: Have just
eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with difficulty
refrained from a fourth (p. 14). Ironically, the compulsiveness
of Krapps banana bulimia is conspicuously analogous to the
compulsiveness of his rememoration. Moreover, his much
emphasized discarding of banana peels is obviously analogous
to his tendency to reject or forget memories.15 He nearly falls
after treading on the first skin, and then finally pushes it, still
stooping, with his foot over the edge of stage into pit (p. 11).
After peeling the second banana, he tosses skin into pit (p.
11). He treats memories in the same way as he treats banana
skins. No longer interested in rememorating the year just
concluded, Krapp first discards the envelope on which he has
scrawled his notes (Crumples it and throws it away [p. 24, my
emphasis]), and then discards the tape on which he is recording,
so that he might gorge once more on the more distant memory
of the girl in the punt: He suddenly bends over machine,
switches off, wrenches off tape, throws it away, puts on the
other, winds it forward to the passage he wants, switches on,
listens staring front (p. 27, my emphasis).
The problem of disposal common to bananas and memories
suggests that, like bananas, memories are [f]atal things for a
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Krapps Last Tape

man with [Krapps] condition (p. 14); for compulsive
consumption of them constipates his life: Whats a year now?
The sour cud and the iron stool (p. 25). Here movement toward
the future is formulated in terms of preoccupation with the past:
These old P.M.s are gruesome, but I often find them(Krapp
switches off, broods, switches on)a help before embarking on
a new . . . (hesitates) . . . retrospect (p. 16). Krapps relation to
memory entails a further paradox. On the one hand, Krapps life
is a repudiating of his own previous or earlier selves and their
respective experiences: Well out of that, Jesus yes! (p. 17);
Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for
thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank
God thats all done with anyway (p. 24). This disposal of the
past seems to serve the project of advancing toward fulfillment
in the future: Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was
a chance of happiness. But I wouldnt want them back. Not
with the fire in me now. No, I wouldnt want them back (p.
28). But on the other hand, the consequence of discarding the
past is eventually to reduce life to regret (drowned in dreams
[p. 25]), with the result, to interpolate Becketts words from
Proust, that Krapp is present at his own absence.16
From this perspective, Krapp does indeed appear
irresponsible, in his failure to control a pattern of thought which
dooms him to nostalgia. Originally, as we have seen, Krapps
retrospective project was not to return to the past, but to define
his identity through the annual progression of perspectives on
the past. But eventually this retrospective project backfires such
that Krapp has no identity but through regretting the past and
abdicating responsibility to identify through striving toward the
future:
Sometimes wondered if a last effort mightnt(Pause.) Ah
finish your booze now and get to your bed. Go on with this
drivel in the morning. Or leave it at that. (Pause.) Lie propped
up in the darkand wander. Be again in the dingle on a
Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the red-berried. All that old
misery. (p. 26)

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Sydney Studies
Yet from another perspective, Krapps relation to memory
enables him to evade the great hazard enunciated in the theory
of life which Beckett formulates in his study of Proust, already
cited.
In this theory, often summarized by critics, the life of an
individual is governed by habits or routine patterns of existence
which sustain their own continuity, and enable the individual to
adapt to his or her environment, until disrupted by a period of
transition, during which for a moment the boredom of living is
replaced by the suffering of being.17 Here, Beckett construes
life in terms of a process of decantation whereby the habits and
forms of life established by the individual in the past must
inevitably yield to changing circumstances and conditions in
the future:
The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation,
decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time,
sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the
fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the
phenomena of its hours.18

As a result of the continual impingement of change and the

need to adapt to it, life is here construed as a succession of
habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals . . .
(my emphasis).19
It is obvious, as Esslin has noted, that the annual tapes
recorded by Krapp foreground this notion of the individual as a
succession of individuals.20 But it has never before been
noticed that Krapps Last Tape actually stages the process of
temporal decantation wherein, according to the passage from
Proust already cited, this succession finds its originating cause.
On three occasions, Krapp disappears backstage into darkness
(pp. 12, 17, 24), where he is heard uncorking bottles and
decanting their contents: Sound of bottle against glass, then
brief siphon (p. 24). Significantly, on each of these occasions,
the passage of time is emphasized: Ten seconds. Loud pop of
cork. Fifteen seconds (p. 12). The link between the passage of
time and decantation is reinforced by Krapps habit of
56

Krapps Last Tape

consulting his prominently displayed [h]eavy silver watch (p.
9) just before each trip backstage to decant (pp. 10, 17, 23).
Ironically, Krapp himself constitutes a dramatic refutation or,
more precisely, counter example of the theory of life which
Beckett expressed in Proust. For in the play, character finally
supersedes the constant process of decantation which
individual identity necessarily undergoes. Here we reach the
deeper significance of the plays title. The notion of life as
succession is displaced by the notion of life as regression.
There will be no more tapes, not because Krapp will not live
another year (as Vivian Mercier suggests), but because Krapp
has found a way to overcome the process of decantation
whereby, through the passage of time, the individual becomes a
succession of individuals.21 By fixating exclusively on past
moments, Krapp reduces the present to the site of
rememoration, and thus fortifies his life against change.
Through regretting the past that can never return, Krapp renders
the future irrelevant. This is his last tape, because there will
never be anything new to record: Leave it at that (p. 26).
Originally, the purpose of retrospect (p. 16) was to mark
annual progress away from the past: Well out of that, Jesus
yes! (p. 17); Thank God thats all done with anyway (p. 24).
But now the only retrospect concerns the importunity of regret:
Be again, be again (p. 26). In discarding the new tape
(wrenches off the tape, throws it away [p. 27]), Krapp
discards the very process by which he confirms his identity as a
succession of individuals. Henceforth, he will be himself only
through interrogating his loss: Could have been happy with
her, up there on the Baltic, and the pines, and the dunes.
(Pause.) Could I? (p. 25).
By this means, Krapp triumphs over the decantation of time,
as defined in Becketts Proust. This triumph can be clarified
through examination of the scene which Krapp most
obsessively rememoratesthe one concerning the girl in the
punt:
We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went
down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her
57

Sydney Studies
with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there
without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us,
gently, up and down, and from side to side. (p. 27)

The passage narrates a remarkable opposition between flux and

immobility. Krapp and the girl are unmoving, but beneath them
all moved. A related opposition closes the play, as Krapp sits
motionless, while [t]he tape runs on in silence (p. 28). Here
Krapp makes love to motionlessness in his life, by giving all his
passion to regret.
Further analysis of this opposition between motion and
motionlessness will clarify the implications of regret in the
play. As a character, Krapp is positioned between two
principles of movement: one concrete (the tapes revolving in
the tape recorder), the other abstract (the passage of time,
suggested, as we have seen, by both the setting in the future
and the repeated action of decantation). Recourse to the tape
recorder is the primary means by which Krapp negates the
movement of time. He does this not merely by focusing on the
past in order to ignore the movement of time toward the future.
More profoundly, the tapes enable him to replace continuity
with atomicityto replace, that is, the experience of time as an
unbroken flow of becoming with the experience of time as a
series of discrete, disposable parts, which can be discarded or
rememorated at will: Happiest moment of the past half million
(p. 25). In his earlier phases, Krapp construed life as a series of
escapes from involvement, with either a loved one (Well out of
that, Jesus yes! [p. 17]) or his own emotional turmoil: Thank
God thats all done with anyway (p. 24). The hidden motive of
the tape recording ritual is to detach Krapp from implication in
the continuity of his own life, by reducing it to a series of
disposable and fixed memories whose relation to the present
Krapp, as he moves through time, can always be repudiated.
Conversely, by fixating on one of those memories, Krapp
repudiates his very location in the present.
This paradoxical project to repudiate the past by discarding
memories, and to repudiate the present by obsessive
remembering, entails a remarkable deconstruction of the theory
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Krapps Last Tape

of life as a succession of individuals, which Beckett formulated
in Proust. As typified by his response to his mothers death,
Krapps reaction, after completing every stage of his life, is
relief that it is All over and done with, at last (p. 20). By this
means, he reduces life to the mere succession of moments
(Moments. Her moments, my moments. The dogs moments
[p. 20]), but without the excruciating intervals of transition
when, according to the schema in Proust, the boredom of
living is replaced by the suffering of being. Yet at the end of
the play, as Krapp sits motionless while [t]he tape runs on in
silence (p. 28), it becomes apparent that his ultimate project is
not merely to reduce life to a succession of moments without
the inconveniently intervening intervals postulated in Proust,
but to empty time of the succession of moments by which its
movement, according to that essay, is punctuated. Thus,
through regret, Krapp simulates a state where time is no longer
threatening, because its movement is divested of succession,
and simply perpetuates the same unchanging preoccupation. He
discards women (living on and off with Bianca in Kedar street
[p. 16]) just as he discards his past selves. But this refusal of
continuity, with either himself or others, is precisely the factor
that inevitably makes his life prey to the futility of regret.22
Yet in the Beckettian universe, a paradoxical transvaluation
of values occurs, such that futility becomes the only valid goal.
Indeed, in an utterance that could serve as Krapps epitaph, the
Unnamable explicitly posits futility as a raison detre: No, one
can spend ones life thus, unable to live, unable to bring to life,
and die in vain, having done nothing, been nothing (Un, p.
358). The Beckettian protagonist is always a monster of the
solitudes (How It Is, p. 13), and Becketts minimalist art
always concerns the little thats left of the little whereby man
continues (How It Is, p. 26): as if to grow less could help, ever
less and less and never quite be gone (Texts for Nothing).23 In
this context, to assess Krapp on the conventional moral plane
(How It Is, p. 57) is a labour in irrelevance. For in Beckettian
terms, through enduring the decantation of time by which he is
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Sydney Studies
aged out of recognition (How It Is, p. 107), Krapp is simply a
Beckettian paradigm of human kind (Texts for Nothing, p.
108), suffering in obedience to the unintelligible terms of an
incomprehensible damnation (Un, p. 308). Ineluctably, in the
Beckettian universe, existence is senseless, speechless,
issueless misery (Molloy, p. 13).
The relation of Krapps Last Tape to the conditions
prevailing in the Beckettian universe can reveal the
undiscovered implications of the stage directions concluding
the play: Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs
on in silence (p. 28). As the couple in Ohio Impromptu, Krapp
is now Buried in who knows what profounds of mind.24
Indeed, Paul Lawley has noted that the relation between the
taped voice of Krapp-at-thirty-nine and Krapp-at-sixty-nine
corresponds to that between Reader and Listener in Ohio
Impromptu.25 In this circumstance, lapsed in silence indefinitely
prolonged, Krapp approaches the Beckettian ideal as formulated
in The Unnamable:
I dont mind failing, its a pleasure, but I want to go silent. Not
as just now, the better to listen, but peacefully, victorious,
without ulterior object. Then it would be a life worth having, a
life at last (Un, p. 310).

As [t]he tape runs on in silence, it is almost as if Krapp were

listening to a recording of silence: listening, that is, to a
transcription of ultimate reality in the Beckettian universe: And
the ticking of an invisible alarm-clock was as the voice of that
silence which, like the dark, would one day triumph too. And
then all would be still and dark and all things at rest for ever at
last (Malone, p. 203).
Hence, Krapp remains a radically ambiguous character. In
terms of the eudaemonistic assumption that the supreme task in
life is to achieve happiness (pp. 16, 28), Krapp is a dismal
failure. But viewed in terms of the Beckettian ideal regarding
silence without ulterior object (Un, p. 310), wherein all
things [are] at rest for ever at last (Malone, p. 203), Krapp
achieves resounding success. For in that silence, lost in reverie
about the punt experience which the recorded voice intoned, it
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Krapps Last Tape

almost seems as if Krapp has fulfilled the Beckettian narrators
project to become him whom the words recall: Will they
succeed in slipping me into him, the memory and dream of me,
into him still living . . . (Texts for Nothing, p. 134). In that
impossible circumstance, silence is the supremeand indeed
onlyfelicity: it will be the silence . . . the lasting one (Un, p.
414). To apply Malones words, Krapp here approaches the
blessedness of absence (Malone, p. 222). For in the nostalgia
induced by old words back from the dead (to invoke Boms
apt formula in How It Is, p. 95), Krapp is not here and now; he
is only there and then.
Yet, at bottom, what Krapp wants is not the return of the
past, but the passionate abandon of the present to the
importunity of retrospect: Once wasnt enough for you.
(Pause.) Lie down across her (pp. 16, 27). In this context, the
irony of Krapps relation with Fanny, the [b]ony old ghost of a
whore emerges: I told her Id been saving up for her all my
life (pp. 25, 26). Through reducing his life to a series of
retrospects on discarded selves and relationships, Krapp tends
inevitably toward the stage where all that remains is regret. But
through that regret, epitomized by obsessive rememoration of
lovemaking in the canoe, Krapp gives all his yearning to
ghoststo the perseveration, that is, of moments long departed,
whose rememoration Krapp pursues with more consistency of
attachment than he ever gave to anything or anyone in the past.
In this sense, he has indeed been saving up for ghosts all his
life, allocating to dead moments a fidelity which he never
accorded to living ones: Thank God thats all done with
anyway (p. 24). As Dr. Johnson wrote in an Idler essay, he to
whom the present offers nothing will often be looking
backward on the past.26 But in Krapps case, the present offers
nothing precisely because his deepest wish is to be a memory
come alive (to borrow a phrase from Kafkas Diaries: 19141923).27 Krapps need is to have no life but rememorating the
one(s) that he rejecteda project epitomized by the narrator of
Enough: It is then I shall have lived then or never.28 The
only way for Krapp to be free of attachment is to be attached,
through regret, to loss.
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Sydney Studies
Krapps failure to find fulfilment through the forward
movement of life can be clarified through reference to Waiting
for Godot. Whereas in Krapps Last Tape the refusal of forward
movement is expressed through regretting a past that will never
return, in Waiting for Godot it is expressed through waiting for
a future that will never happen or arrive. The future will never
happen, because it already has happened, as evident in
Estragons amplification of his observation regarding Another
day done with: For me its over and done with, no matter what
happens (p. 38). Whereas Krapp focuses on events already
concluded, Estragon focuses inevitable conclusion. By opposite
means, each rejects the notion of novelty in lifean attitude
articulated in the opening sentence of Murphy: The sun shone,
having no alternative, on the nothing new.29 In consequence,
all that remains is repetition, as epitomized in Krapps
imperative, Be again (p. 26).
In this context, Krapps immunity to moral evaluation is
confirmed. For his recourse to regret here appears not as a
character fault, but as [a]n automatic adjustment of the human
organism to the conditions of its existence . . . (to retrieve a
formula from Proust).30 In the Beckettian universe, reality is
reduced to recurring cycle which prevents creative advance:
the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole
bloody business starting all over again (Watt).31 Viewed from
this angle, Krapps regret results not so much from choice as
from mechanical and involuntary adaptation to the unavoidable
circumstances of life. Indeed, the mechanical aspect of Krapp is
suggested by his close relation with his machine (p. 13), the
tape-recorder. In fact, as Paul Lawley points out, Beckett
instructed the actor, Pierre Chabert, to [b]ecome as much as
possible one with the machine.32
But, regardless of such emphasis, Krapp is a man, not a
machineone who has abdicated responsibility to control his
own compulsion toward mechanical repetition, with respect to
both bananas and the recourse to rememoration which, as we
have seen, they symbolize. Indeed, as noted earlier with respect
to his banana bulimia, Krapp himself acknowledges his failure
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Krapps Last Tape

to control compulsive consumption: Cut em out! (p. 14). But
his resolution soon lapses. Indeed, Krapps frequent intervals of
vacuity are prominently associated with the very bananas which
he undertakes to forswear. For example, twice on the same page
the same description of his action is repeated: puts end of
banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously
before him (p. 11). Virtually the same description pertains to
Krapps immersion in nostalgia at the end of the play: Krapp
motionless staring before him, as the tape runs on in silence
(p. 28). We reach here the deeper implication of Krapps
identification with the tape recorder which, as we have just
seen, Beckett, when directing the play, emphasized. Krapp
wants to become one with the machineto merge, that is, with
reiterated memoryso that the effort of living is replaced by
surrender to regret.
Krapps contribution to his own predicament can be gauged
by considering the remarkable moment when the present Krapp
(aged 69) and a past Krapp (aged 39) share laughs regarding a
Krapp from an earlier year:
Hard to believe I was ever that young whelp. The voice! Jesus!
And the aspirations! (Brief laugh in which Krapp joins.) And
the resolutions! (Brief laugh in which Krapp joins.) To drink
less, in particular. (Brief laugh of Krapp alone.) (p. 16)
Sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks God that its over.
(Pause.) False ring there. (Pause.) Shadows of the opus . . .
magnum. Closing with a(brief laugh)yelp to Providence.
(Prolonged laugh in which Krapp joins.) (p. 17)

The key to understanding this shared laughter is to consider

first the sole instance when only Krapp laughs: Brief laugh of
Krapp alone. The topic on that occasion concerns the
resolution [t]o drink less. It is obvious that the younger Krapp
still takes that resolution seriously, though he is unable to fulfill
it. But in the years since then, Krapp has abandoned all his
resolutions, and can laugh as readily at that one as at all the
others. As Ruby Cohn observes, The laughter is inspired by the
futility of aspiration and resolution.33 Similarly, Steven Connor
argues that Krapps laugh alone adds a layer of disillusion.34
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Sydney Studies
But as the end of the play suggests, this defeatist and weakwilled attitude has the last laugh on Krapp.
Perhaps a deeper implication of this laughter is indicated by
the celebrated typology of laughter in Watt: the bitter laugh
which laughs at that which is not good; the hollow laugh
which laughs at that which is not true; and the mirthless
laugh which laughs . . . at that which is unhappy.35
Ultimately, the laughter in Krapps Last Tape pertains to this
third category: the laugh that sneers (to use the younger
Krapps term) at unhappinessthat is, at disappointment,
surrender, lapse of will, and defeat. For the perfect defence
against these calamities is to mock the suffering of them. Yet
the deeper irony of Krapps laughter is that he shirks the effort
to achieve happiness. It is much easier to cry about happiness
lost, forfeited, or never achieved:
Scalded the eyes out of me reading Effie again, a page a day,
with tears again. Effie . . . (Pause.) Could have been happy
with her, up there on the Baltic, and the pines, and the dunes.
(Pause.) Could I? (p. 25)

Krapp refuses to face his predicament in the present and take

responsibility for his feelings about it. Through self-pitying
regret, Krapp repudiates his present life, just as he repudiates
and repudiated his past selves. His present suffering is never his
fault. It can be blamed on the past, and the decisions made or
avoided then. That is the belief [he has] been going on all [his]
life (p. 21).
The irony of Krapps predicament can be further clarified. In
an earlier phase, on the occasion of his vision (p. 20), he
believed in the unshatterable association until my dissolution
of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the
fire (p. 21). On one level, Krapp has obviously failed to fulfill
the promise of his vision; for his creative life never fructified.
But on a more profound level, he did indeed fulfil the
implications of his vision regarding the fusion of light and
darkness. For through reducing his life to the agony of regret,
he has inundated the light of the understanding with
anguished nostalgia, so that the fire in him is now explicitly
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Krapps Last Tape

linked with yearning for death: drowned in dreams and
burning to be gone (p. 25, my emphasis). At the moment of his
spectacular vision, Krapp did not expect that this would be its
result. But he never achieves recognition or anagnorisis
regarding his plight. Just as he recognizes the problem of his
bowel condition (p. 13), yet refuses to control the banana
bulimia which aggravates it, so he recognizes the sense of
misery (p. 26) which has always dogged his life, but refuses to
take responsibility for its cause: obsessive-compulsive regret
the need to define himself through retrospect (p. 16).

2
3

Ruby Cohn, The Laughter of Sad Sam Beckett, in Samuel

Beckett Now, ed. Melvin J. Friedman, 2nd edn (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 185-97 (p. 194), and
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, rev. edn (New York:
Doubleday, 1969), p. 56.
Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (New York: Random
House, 1972), p. 26.
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
(London: Bloomsbury, 1996). A short list of these links as
documented by Knowlson will illustrate. Here and elsewhere,
references to Samuel Beckett, Krapps Last Tape, in Krapps Last
Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (New York: Grove, 1957) are
included in the text in parentheses. (a) The girl in the punt
connected with Ethna MacCarthy with whom Beckett fell in love
soon after enrolling at Trinity College in October 1923
(Knowlson, pp. 442-3); (b) Krapps girl in a shabby green coat
(p. 17) associated with Peggy Sinclair, a cousin with whom
Beckett fell in love in the summer of 1928 (Knowlson, p. 81); (c)
Miss Beamish (whom Beckett first met when he came to Rousillon
in 1942) as the model for Old Miss McGlome (p. 15; Knowlson,
pp. 330-1); (d) Krapps outdoor vision, at last (p. 20) derived
from Becketts own indoor vision in his mothers room during the
summer of 1945 (Knowlson p. 352); (e) the house on the canal
where mother lay a-dying, in the late autumn, after her long
viduity (p. 18) connected with Merrion Nursing Home where
Becketts mother, May, died of Parkinsons disease on August 25,
1950 (Knowlson, p. 384). Anthony Uhlmann relates Krapps
account of his vision to Schopenhauers account of artistic
65

Sydney Studies

7.

10
11
12

13

14

66

genius: Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999), p. 19.
Joseph H. Smith, Notes on Krapp, Endgame, and Applied
Psychoanalysis, in Joseph H. Smith, ed., The World of Samuel
Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp.
195-203 (p. 197).
Anthony Kubiak, Post Apocalypse with Out Figures: The Trauma
of Theater in Samuel Beckett, in Smith, World of Samuel Beckett,
pp. 107-24 (p. 121).
Daniel Katz, Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in
the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1999) p. 9.
For the first quotation, see Matthew Arnold, Wordsworth, in
Victorian Poetry and Poetics, ed. Walter E. Houghton and G.
Robert Stange (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 539. For the
second quotation, see Matthew Arnold, Marcus Aurelius, in
Essays in Criticism, First Series, in English Prose of the Victorian
Era, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold and William D. Templeman
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 1085.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies,
The Unnamable, trans. Samuel Beckett, with Patrick Bowles
assisting with the translation of Molloy (New York: Grove Press,
1958), p. 148. Further references to Molloy, to Malone Dies
(abbreviated Malone), and to The Unnamable (abbreviated Un)
are included in the text in parentheses.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, trans. Samuel Beckett (New
York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 14. Further references to this work
are included in the text in parentheses.
Samuel Beckett, Company (London: Calder, 1979, 1980), p. 89.
Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 269.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, in Rasselas, Poems, and Selected
Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (1759; New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, 1952), p. 505.
See Heracleitus of Ephesus, Fragment #119, in Ancilla to the PreSocratic Philosophers, trans. Kathleen Freeman (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 32.
See, for example, Alan Astro, Understanding Samuel Beckett
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), p. 155;
Sylvie Debevec Henning, Becketts Critical Complicity: Carnival,

Krapps Last Tape

15

16

17

18
19
20
21
22

23

24

25

Contestation, and Tradition (Lexington: University Press of

Kentucky, 1988), p. 153; Jon Erickson, Self-Objectification and
Preservation in Becketts Krapps Last Tape, in The World of
Samuel Beckett, ed. Joseph H. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991), pp. 181-94 (p. 187).
For critics who note Krapps tendency to forget or disremember,
see Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977), and Henning, Becketts Critical
Complicity, p. 147.
Samuel Beckett, Proust, in Proust and Three Dialogues with
Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1965), p. 27.
Beckett, Proust, p. 19. For treatments of the relevance of Proust to
Krapps Last Tape, see Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism:
Becketts Late Style in the Theater (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), p. 19; Henning, Becketts Critical Complicity, pp.
144-58; Erickson, Self-Objectification and Preservation, pp.
181-94.
Beckett, Proust, p. 15.
Beckett, Proust, p. 19.
Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd, p. 56.
Mercier, Beckett/Beckett, p. 184.
However, some critics link the predicament of the aged Krapp
with too much concern for the future (in the mode of artistic
ambition), not too little. See Mercier, Beckett/Beckett, p. 201; John
Pilling, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1976), p. 85; H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: The
Author in the Autograph (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996),
p. 65.
Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing, in Stories and Texts for
Nothing, trans. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p.
112. Samuel Beckett, How It Is, trans. Samuel Beckett (New
York: Grove Press, 1964). Further references to these works are
included in the text in parentheses.
Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, in Three Plays: Ohio
Impromptu, Catastrophe, and What Where (New York: Grove
Press, 1984), p. 18.
Paul Lawley, Stages of Identity: from Krapps last tape to Play,
in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling
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Sydney Studies

26

27

28
29
30
31
32
33

34

35

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 88-105 (p.

91).
Johnson, Idler No. 72 (September 1, 1759), in Rasselas, Poems,
and Selected Prose, p. 191.
Franz Kafka, entry for October 15, 1921, Diaries 1914-1923,
trans. Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt, in I am a Memory
Come Alive: Autobiographical Writings by Franz Kafka, ed.
Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1974), p. 203.
Samuel Beckett, Enough, trans. Samuel Beckett, in First Love
and Other Shorts (New York: Grove Press, 1974), p. 57.
Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938; New York: Grove Press, 1957), p.
1.
Beckett, Proust, p. 20.
Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 47.
Lawley, Stages of Identity, p. 93.
Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1974), p. 94.
Steven Connor, What? Where? Presence and Repetition in
Becketts Theater, in Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical
Essays, ed. Lance St John and Robin J. Davis (New York: St.
Martins, 1990), pp. 1-19 (p. 6).
Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 48.
Ruby Cohn draws attention to Watts anatomy of laughter, but
does not apply it specifically to Krapps Last Tape: Laughter, p.
185.

ERIC P. LEVY is Associate Professor of English at the University

of British Columbia. His publications include a book and
articles on Samuel Beckett, as well as articles on Hamlet, Emily
Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, D. H. Lawrence, T. S.
Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Tennessee Williams, Christology, and
self-pity neurosis.

68